On the trail of a Dutch postwar mystery

Photo courtesy of the Albany County Hall of Records: Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, left, with Albany Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd and his wife Betty.

Photo courtesy of the Albany County Hall of Records: Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, left, with Albany Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd and his wife Betty.

Photo: JOHN CARL D'ANNIBALE

Photo: JOHN CARL D'ANNIBALE

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Photo courtesy of the Albany County Hall of Records: Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, left, with Albany Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd and his wife Betty.

Photo courtesy of the Albany County Hall of Records: Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, left, with Albany Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd and his wife Betty.

Photo: JOHN CARL D'ANNIBALE

On the trail of a Dutch postwar mystery

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Albany

Anja Adriaans traveled 4,000 miles from the city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands in search of a black-and-white short film that has been missing for 63 years.

"This is Nijmegen" was commissioned by the Dutch government after World War II.

It documented catastrophic losses following American bombardments and an Allied offensive of the occupied city led by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division in September 1944. The assault drove the German Army out of their last line of defense in the strategic city at the confluence of the Rhine, Waal and Meuse rivers near the German border.

The film project also was meant to generate donations for Nijmegen's postwar reconstruction.

Now, nobody can locate a single copy of the film on either side of the Atlantic.

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The Dutch city of 120,000 suffered some of the heaviest bombing of the war and paid a terrible cost for liberation: 2,200 citizens killed and 5,500 critically wounded; 2,260 homes destroyed and 1,300 damaged; and 400 streets ruined.

Three-quarters of the historic city center, one of the oldest in the Netherlands, was reduced to rubble.

"People in Nijmegen tried to forget about it and to move on. It wasn't talked about," said Adriaans, who earned a master's degree in American Studies at Radboud and participated in a June conference titled "The Politics and Culture of Liberation."

The grotesqueries of war meant that Allied troops were both Nijmegen's destroyers and Nijmegen's liberators.

"There is absolutely no hate toward Americans," Adriaans said. "There is gratitude. Mostly, there is grief for all that we lost. It still has the feel of a city's broken heart."

"This is Nijmegen" was shown to an estimated 50,000 moviegoers in Albany in the early weeks of 1950 at seven movie theaters across town: the Strand, Ritz, Madison, Delaware, Paramount, Eagle and Royal.

The film was a thank you to the residents of Albany, who gathered 300 tons of donations, including food, vitamins, pots and pans, medical supplies, clothing, shoes, toys, window glass, building materials and other goods valued at nearly $1 million. The humanitarian aid was loaded onto the cargo ship Westerdam at the Port of Albany on July 9, 1947.

The generosity of the Dutch-settled city — spearheaded by Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd, an Army private who returned from combat in Europe in September 1945 — gained national attention.

Time magazine ran a photo spread with the heading, "Albany Adopts Nymegen." (Nymegen is an alternate English spelling of Nijmegen.)

The shipment of aid forged a deep bond. A sister city relationship developed and formal exchanges followed. It spurred Albany's inaugural Tulip Festival in 1949. A visit by Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands in 1959 led to construction of Empire State Plaza after Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller was embarrassed by rundown buildings and shabby streets he drove through on his tour with the princess.

Searches in boxes of Corning's papers at the Albany Institute came up empty, but Adriaans received encouragement from Prentiss Carnell, longtime library volunteer who inventoried the audio-video material. "I won't say it's not here," Carnell said. "Things we don't know about pop up sometimes." He described discovering Parker F. Dunn's World War I Medal of Honor in a box three years ago.

"It's a little like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we never say never," said executive director Tammis Groft, who told Adriaans about a family's unexpected donation of John Wilson's 1850 painting "The Albany Fair" after she hunted for it for a decade.

Adriaans is working on other fronts. She is meeting with officials at the University at Albany and Siena College to discuss their academic exchanges with Radboud University.

Adriaans is also doing research for a Nijmegen newspaper, De Gelderlander, which is producing a series of articles and a commemorative book leading up to a Nov. 23 dedication of a new bridge, the Oversteek ("Crossing") over the River Waal. The bridge will feature a war memorial to 48 American paratroopers killed in the Sept. 20, 1944 assault. Four were from New York state: Nick Esposito, of Rome, Oneida County; Edward Wisniewski, Nassau County; and Harry Busby and Anthony Bei, both of New York City. Esposito's relatives will attend the bridge dedication, and she is trying to find family members of the others.

There will be 48 lanterns on the bridge, one for each of the Americans who died alongside the River Waal.

"We think of them as our boys," Adriaans said. "They made the ultimate sacrifice for us."